Does Altitude Training Really Work?

My column in today's Globe and Mail is on a couple of recent experiments that raise some interesting questions about whether altitude training is as effective as most coaches, athletes and scientists really believe. One of the studies was a careful, placebo-controlled double-blinded lab study; the other was a real-world study using the Australian swim team. Both failed to find performance improvements from altitude training.

[...] Still, few people had any doubt that LHTL worked. When Carsten Lundby, a researcher at the University of Zurich’s Center for Integrative Human Physiology, began organizing a meticulous double-blinded, placebo-controlled study of LHTL, his main goal was to pinpoint exactly which physiological mechanisms were responsible for LHTL’s performance boost.The study, which was published in the January issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology, involved 16 well-trained cyclists, who spent a total of eight weeks at a training centre on the French-Swiss border. For four of those weeks, they spent 16 hours a day in “hypoxic” rooms in which the effective altitude could be adjusted. Ten rooms were kept at 3,000 metres above sea level, while the other six were kept at less than 1,200 metres. Neither the athletes nor the scientists responsible for testing knew which rooms were which, and the athletes were unable to guess at the end of the study whether they’d been living “high” or “low.”Shockingly, the researchers were unable to find any differences, either in blood measurements like hemoglobin mass or in cycling performance, between the two groups either during or after the training period. “It was a surprise to us,” Dr. Lundby admits. [...]

When I blogged about these studies earlier, it sparked a lot of discussion. These studies certainly don't prove that "altitude training doesn't work" -- but, as Dr. Lundby suggests, they might make athletes who are considering how to allocate their scarce financial resources think twice about whether these training camps are worthwhile.